A canal near my apartment

Welcome friends, family, and future students,

I made it! I have been in Copenhagen, Denmark for about 2 weeks and am just about settled in. Now that the whirlwind of arriving has died down a bit, I would like to talk about why I chose this program. My main hope for this blog is to help future study abroad students, so perhaps my thought process can add some insight into the complicated and (at least for me), overwhelming process of choosing an OCS program.

Since I am majoring in Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology, my choices when choosing a program were to either take a semester off from science classes and choose one of the many programs where I could complete my distribution requirements, or choose from the smaller number of programs that had science courses which would transfer back towards the BBMB major. I chose this second option, and upon seeing the very cool science classes as well as research opportunities that DIS Copenhagen had to offer, decided that this program best suited my interests and future goals.

Here’s the deal. I really have no idea what I want to pursue after Whitman. Do I want to go into medicine? Research? Pharmaceutical industry? I saw DIS, with the many classes relating to health and medicine, as a perfect way to learn about the medical field and get a better idea of my interests in that. At the same time, I will be working in a neurobiology research laboratory, where I will be able to get a better idea of how much I enjoy research. Hopefully, I will finish this semester with a clearer goal for the future.

Now that I am here, I know it was a good choice. I am taking three classes, Danish Politics and Society, Danish Language and Culture, and my core course, Human Health and Disease: A Clinical Approach. My health class is taught by a practicing physician who works in the neurology department of a local hospital, and I can already tell that the professor and the hands-on type of learning that we will do in the class will give me excellent insight into what the medical field is really like. I am also especially excited to get to know the professor of this class since neuroscience is one of the scientific fields I am especially interested in, and is the field in which I will be conducting research throughout this semester. So, everything seems to be connecting quite perfectly!

Until next time,

Isabella